Review: Jack B. Bedell
On Jack B. Bedell’s Color All Maps New
by Tyler Truman Julian
Color All Maps New, Jack B. Bedell’s sixteenth poetry collection (an impressive feat in and of itself), is the remarkable work of an artist sure of his craft. Bedell’s poems sit easily in the intersections of place and memory, narrative and description, humanity and ecology, moving just as easily between personal, regional, and universal lenses. With an incisive and reflective voice, reminiscent of Mary Oliver, Bedell has developed a collection that captures his home state, Louisiana, in its present moment, shining a hopeful (and always believable) light on the landscape, even as it shifts before his eyes.
Hurricane Ida made landfall at the areas described in Color All Maps New in late August 2021. Revisiting these poems post-Ida brings new meaning to many of the lines throughout the collection, emphasizing those tied to climate change, environmental degradation, and importantly, sustainability. In a poem in which Bedell’s speaker describes the draining of a lake for oil extraction, the onlookers seem surprised to find that a rainstorm would bring the water back:
Silt bottom dried slowly,
stared at the sky like a blank face,
until one night after a rain
the water came back.
Pine trees swayed in the breeze
coming off Lake Peigneur. Shore birds
swam in patterns between stumps.
First morning light brought
the gift of fog settling
above the tusks of mastodons,
reminders this place will be,
whether or not we are.
(“Jefferson Island, 1980”)
This collection, like Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler, is a tracker of the social impact of environmental change. As Bedell points to this change, the impact, he also points to how change, in general, is inevitable, and how it causes movement and growth. Even as waves cause erosion, “will color all maps new,” as Bedell writes, the “[s]ilence in their loss / rises from the water as psalm” (“Nuage,” “Exhumation”). There is destruction here, but there is also renewal. Honesty tempers the hope in these poems and makes it palatable.
The inevitability of change extends beyond environment in Color All Maps New, and it is in this pattern of change that Bedell looks at themes of family and community. In “Gulf, Waves,” Bedell’s speaker describes his daughter writing names in the beach sand. He explains,
She wants to spell out the names
of all the people she loves,
but the closer the water gets,
the more she knows
she’ll have to edit her list
on the fly, leave some names
behind in the air to beat the tide,
its hunger boundless, and time.
In this collection, Bedell is a mature writer, sharing reflections on life and death and time. Time does not stop, an idea reinforced throughout these poems and mirrored by the ever-cresting waves that bring both disaster and joy. This duality is something that many people in harsh landscapes love and struggle with in the places they call home. It is Bedell’s experience and clear-eyed wisdom that can walk us effortlessly to poems like “Communal,” which tells us that “togetherness, time, and a little help / will fill our bowls to overflowing,” and make us believe.